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A Model of Collaborative Entrepreneurship for a More Humanistic Management

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Abstract

Inter-organizational models are both a well-documented phenomena and a well-established domain in management and business ethics. Those models rest on collaborative capabilities. However, mainstream theories and practices aimed at developing these capabilities are based on a narrow set of assumptions and ethical principles about human nature and relationships, which constrain the very development of capabilities sought by them. This article presents an Aristotelic–Thomistic approach to collaborative entrepreneurship within and across communities of firms operating in complementary markets. Adopting a scholarship of integration approach and evaluating the six studies of communities of organizations, we contribute an inter-organizational network model based on the assumptions about human motives and choice offered by Aristotle. We argue that the sustainability of inter-organizational communities depends on how rich is the set of assumptions about human nature upon which they are based. In order to develop and sustain collaborative capabilities in inter-organizational communities, a set of assumptions that takes both self-regarding and others’-regarding preferences as ends is required to avoid any kind of instrumentalization of collaboration, which is an end in itself. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants at the 15th International Symposium on Ethics, Business, and Society and at the Workshop on Humanizing the Firm and the Management Profession, IESE Business School for a number of comments and suggestions that were helpful in preparing the final draft. We are also grateful to Grant Miles, Charles Snow, and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments. The first author is very grateful to Dolores Mariezcurrena for her␣assistance, and to Vanina Ubino, Pablo Borrelli, Richard Fenton, Marco De Santis, and their colleagues for their time during the process of researching the LATAM cases. The usual disclaimers apply.

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  1. Business Policy, IAE Business School, Austral University, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Hector Rocha & Raymond Miles

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  1. Hector Rocha
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  2. Raymond Miles
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Correspondence to Hector Rocha.

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Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 15th International Symposium on Ethics, Business, and Society at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain, on May 16–17, 2008 and at the Workshop on Humanizing the Firm and the Management Profession, IESE Business School, June 30–July 2, 2008.

Appendix A

Appendix A

The phenomenon-driven nature of this study makes conceptualizing the emerging inter-organizational community a challenge (Rocha, 2004 and Rocha and Sternberg, 2005 for the case of inter-organizational communities geographically concentrated). These communities are complex phenomena and given their emerging nature, there is no readily available secondary data to use as proxies.

Therefore, we have relied on the validity criterion used in qualitative research (Yin, 1994). Validity is defined as the extent to which the operational definition captures the concept under study, and two of the main strategies are extensive reviews of the literature on the concept (Miles et al., 2005; Rocha, 2004) and in deep interviews and/or participation in the cases.

As for this latter strategy, we have used case research, using two steps. First, the gathering of secondary data through desk research to have a preliminary picture of the organizations and the sectors in which they operate, and to complement and triangulate the information gathered in the second stage. Second, we have had interviews and face to face interaction with at least 15 members of each community, including different levels of membership and different management groups. Therefore, our method was both collaborative and participative. We engaged in dialogues and discussions with managers as co-researchers, given their first-hand knowledge of the reality we were trying to identify and analyze.

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Rocha, H., Miles, R. A Model of Collaborative Entrepreneurship for a More Humanistic Management. J Bus Ethics 88, 445–462 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0127-8

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